


Like A Shadow

by starsandgraces



Category: Star Trek (2009)
Genre: AU, M/M, Minor Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-10-14
Updated: 2010-10-14
Packaged: 2017-10-12 16:03:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,629
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/126646
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starsandgraces/pseuds/starsandgraces
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Angel AU. The first rule of being a guardian angel is that you never get too involved with your assignment.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Like A Shadow

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [simmysim](http://simmysim.livejournal.com/) (for [this post](http://community.livejournal.com/chekov_sulu/129094.html)) and [kinkme](http://kinkme.livejournal.com/) (for inspiring the fic with [this comment](http://community.livejournal.com/chekov_sulu/129094.html?thread=961606#t961606)). Beta'd by [withthepilot](http://withthepilot.livejournal.com/). The title is a lyric from 'To France' by Mike Oldfield.

"We have a new assignment for you, Hikaru," Elior says.

"Why?" Hikaru asks. "I'm supposed to get a vacation now, sir; I only just got off my last assignment."

"This one's important," his boss replies irritably. A folder drops into Hikaru's hands. "Read it and get back down to Earth."

"Where?"

"Saint Petersburg."

And that's how Hikaru Sulu finds himself standing by the door of a hospital room, watching a labouring woman. Her name is Larisa Chekova, his file informs him, and her dark curls are stuck to her forehead. For a brief moment her eyes seem to alight on Hikaru, but he doesn't worry. Humans can't see him unless he wants them to.

Wherever possible, he likes to be there when his charges are born. But some labours are long, and he has the time to read and re-read the folder Elior gave him. It tells him that the boy Larisa is giving birth to is going to do something so unprecedented that even the angels can't see what will happen. He knows, already, that Larisa will have only this one child before she dies too young.

"The man," Larisa says in a tired voice. "Who is the man?"

"There's no man here, Larisa," one of her midwives replies. "You're exhausted."

"I must be seeing things," she says, but she's looking at Hikaru again. He concentrates a little harder on staying invisible and a look of confusion crosses her face as he disappears from her view.

Her labour progresses as expected after that. Hikaru finds the whole process messy and inefficient, as he always does, but each species to its own. He's not one to judge. Larisa's husband, Andrei, arrives eventually, and he holds onto her hand tightly, whispering into her ear.

The baby is born a few hours before dawn. They name him Pavel but Larisa calls him Pasha.

***

Hikaru enjoys watching Pavel grow up. Most of the time he's a sturdy, serious child, but when he laughs his whole body shakes with glee. His parents adore him and he wants for nothing, though he sometimes dreams of a younger brother to play with.

In the absence of a sibling, he's happy enough to sit in his room and read every PADD and book he can lay his hands on, something which Hikaru is grateful for. He can slip reading material into the pile and he never once has to step in and save Pavel from impending danger. The only thing he wants to save Pavel from, he can't—it has to happen. But in the meantime, all Hikaru has to do with his days is watch.

The winter of the year Pavel turns five, Larisa falls beneath the ice on the Neva and drowns.

One of his aunts dresses him in black for the funeral and spends half an hour combing Pavel's curls through with product until they come unwound and stick to his scalp. He looks strangely younger and vulnerable like this, but he stands obstinately next to his father as Andrei gives a choked eulogy.

Hikaru is standing against the back wall and watching, as he always does, when he realises he isn't alone.

"What is your name?" Larisa asks Hikaru quietly. She's wearing a green dress and she won't take her eyes off her pale, sad son.

"Hikaru," he answers.

"I knew I saw you when Pasha was born. Will you look after him for me?"

"I've been looking after him all along," Hikaru says, and he takes her hand gently. "You can't stay, you know."

"I know," she whispers. "I just needed to make sure he would be alright."

Pavel looks up as if he heard his mother's voice, then, and his eyes widen imperceptibly.

"Can he see us?" Larisa asks, her hand lifting towards Pavel involuntarily.

"He shouldn't be able to, but then you shouldn't have been able to see me in the hospital. I think it might run in the family." He raises one hand to Pavel, and the boy's lips part in a silent gasp before he nods back solemnly. Then Hikaru concentrates, as he did the day Pavel was born, and this time Pavel gasps aloud when they vanish. An aunt assumes he's about to cry and whisks him away from his father's side, clutching him against her chest.

That's the winter that makes Pavel start running.

He starts to grow distant from his father, or his father grows distant from him. It's difficult to tell who pulled away first. Andrei is satisfied with mental distance from his son, while Pavel favours physical distance. He runs across the city every day, and he only comes back when night starts to fall and he can't ignore his stomach's demands any more. Hikaru hates running but he follows Pavel every step of the way.

For his sixth birthday, one of his uncles gives him a telescope. When Hikaru sees Pavel unwrap it, he feels something click into place inside him and he knows that this is what will set Pavel along the path he needs to travel.

He still runs across the city, but now he takes food and his telescope with him and stays out all night whenever he can get away with it. The light pollution makes it almost impossible to see anything, but he still stares up at the sky night after night. He devours everything he can find on space and alien species, and takes extra mathematics and physics classes at school until they run out of material.

When he's ten, he's offered a place at Star City Conservatory outside Moscow, and he and Andrei have a screaming row about it. Pavel wants to leave. Andrei, in spite of everything, refuses to allow him to go.

"You don't care about me while I'm here! Why should you care if I leave?" Pavel spits.

"Because you are my son, Pavel Andreievich, and you will do as I tell you!" Andrei shouts back, clenching his fists at his sides.

Hikaru hates watching people fighting. It makes him feel like more of a voyeur than almost anything else, and that takes a lot for someone whose job has been to follow people around and watch them intently for countless centuries. When the argument degenerates into the two of them bellowing about not being wanted anyway (Pavel) and family being more important than anything else (Andrei), Hikaru leaves. They need to resolve this thing by themselves and Hikaru has something he needs to start preparing for, on the other side of the planet.

When he returns to Saint Petersburg, the fight has cooled down—but it hasn't ended. It takes another ten days for that to happen, when one of Pavel's teachers comes to the house on her own initiative to beg Andrei to allow his son to go.

"We can't teach him any more here, Mr Chekov," she says. "Your son is a genius and the Conservatory would be the best place for him."

Hikaru will never admit to giving Andrei a little nudge at this point.

***

He books a seat on the same passenger shuttle that Andrei and Pavel take to Moscow at the end of the summer, being careful to keep his face hidden. Andrei drops him off at the Conservatory with a hand on his shoulder and a curt, "Make us proud."

"Yes, Papa," Pavel says, looking very small and unsure.

Hikaru knows he cries into his pillow for the first three nights, but there's nothing he can really do. He tries sending Pavel comforting thoughts and it seems to help, but he's never been this involved with an assignment before and he can't help but think that his judgement might be clouded by it.

He's still very young to be at the Conservatory and the two friends he makes in the initial weeks—Irina and Piotr—are both two years older than him. But for the first time, Pavel's among people who are as intelligent as he is. Hikaru is thrilled to find that Pavel is as happy as he was in the years before Larisa's death. He doesn't stop to think that he's never cared about this sort of thing before being assigned Pavel.

The happiness makes his job a little easier. With Pavel being more open, his emotions and thoughts resonate more easily, and Hikaru doesn't need to watch him as often. He can hang around in the general region and still know what's happening.

Sometimes the link between them enables him to put things together before Pavel does. He knows that Pavel is gay before he realises, and has to suffer through the excruciating embarrassment of a pubescent boy's fumblings with someone he isn't really attracted to. Sex might be natural for humans but it's never been a part of Hikaru's life, and while he retains a detached sort of curiosity about the process, it doesn't seem to him like it should be much more pleasant than labour.

He wishes he could just go and tell Pavel he's gay and that he should stop trying with Irina. It's painful for everyone involved.

Around the same time, Pavel exhausts the resources at the Conservatory and is encouraged by his teachers to apply to Starfleet Academy in San Francisco. They've never taken someone so young before, but Pavel takes the advice and sits the entrance exams.

He goes back home to wait for his results and talk to his father.

"Would you mind if I moved to San Francisco?" he asks.

"Your mother and I only ever wanted you to be happy, Pavel," Andrei replies. "If Starfleet will make you happy, you should go."

"What if I don't pass the tests?"

Andrei exhales slowly. "I think if anyone can pass the tests, it is you."

Half a world away, Hikaru feels the fierce burst of pride inside Pavel at his father's words. He's in San Francisco, preparing to become Cadet Sulu, command-track pilot. The only way to follow Pavel into space, where he's inevitably headed, is to follow him through the academy first. He picks a job that will keep him close to Pavel—who, though he doesn't know it yet, will become a navigator—but with enough differences between their chosen paths that Pavel should never even notice him.

He doesn't. He's too busy being the Russian kid who's not only younger than everyone else, but also speaks thickly accented Standard. Hikaru's busier than he'd expected, too. While he can access almost every piece of knowledge he might need instantly, he has to keep it at the right level. He doesn't realise this until after he's accidentally gained a PhD at an age when it should be almost impossible for a human.

The sex thing comes back to haunt him several years in. With access to a wider pool of peers, Pavel explores his sexuality to the fullest extent. The night he loses his virginity to a man, Hikaru—who had been taking a nap—wakes up with an erection like nothing he's ever seen before. He's had to deal with them once or twice in the past, but this is the first time it's ever been caused by sexual arousal. Hikaru was unaware he was even capable of sexual arousal. He locks himself in the bathroom and strokes himself slowly and deliberately until he comes, his other hand steadying himself against the tiled wall.

Elior comes to see him the next day. "You're getting too attached, Hikaru," he says with a frown. "The bond between you and your assignment is stronger than any I've seen before. You need to take a step back before we're forced to assign this case to someone else."

"I can deal with it," Hikaru says. He feels a little panicky at the thought of Pavel being taken away. "And... I made a promise to his mother that I'd look after him."

"Since when do you make promises to humans?" Elior asks, but not unkindly.

"Just the one promise. Just because she could see me while she was alive." He neglects to add that Pavel, too, saw him while he was alive.

"Hrm. Just don't do anything stupid, Hikaru. You're good at your job and I'd hate to see you give everything up over one human. You know there's no coming back from that."

"I know," he says. "But I feel like everything's coming to a head. Whatever he's going to do, he's going to do it in the next year."

Elior nods. "You mentioned that in your last report. It's more than anyone up top knows, so we owe you for that, at least."

"Thank you, sir," Hikaru replies.

"Keep it up," he says. Then he nods to Hikaru again and leaves.

***

Hikaru knows what's going to happen the minute the call is put out for all cadets to report to the hangar. He also knows he needs to be on the bridge of the _Enterprise_ , so he does something he generally dislikes and the pilot originally assigned the helmsman position mysteriously comes down with lungworms. It's intensely unpleasant but it isn't fatal, and it gets Hikaru to where he has to be.

He doesn't need to look to see Pavel sitting to his right in the navigator's chair. Pavel is too busy familiarising himself with the controls to look across at the man he's sharing the console with, which Hikaru is grateful for.

The first thing he has to do is prevent them from arriving at Vulcan at the same time as the rest of the ships. When Pike asks him to warp out, Hikaru "forgets" to disengage the external inertial dampeners, and then acts like he doesn't know what he's done wrong for long enough to give them a chance. Pavel looks across at him strangely but Hikaru ignores him.

Once he's made the ship-wide broadcast, he leans over to Hikaru and whispers, "Everyone makes mistakes sometimes, Sulu. You should not be embarrassed."

Hikaru hums noncommittally in reply. Pavel doesn't try to talk to him again, but he isn't annoyed, Hikaru can tell. His proximity to Pavel is making the bond almost unbearable, like a physical pain in his chest. Because of it, he volunteers to go with Captain Pike when he asks for people with combat experience. He picks fencing when Kirk asks him what experience he has, because how much can fencing differ to using a flaming sword?

On the drill, he's a hero. He kills the two Romulans and pulls Kirk up from the edge before they disable the beam that's boring into the core of the planet.

And then Nero drops something into the hole and starts to pull the drill back up. It feels like the whole world lurches, and for the first time in seventeen years, he misses his wings. Hope surges when Kirk crashes into him in mid-air and Hikaru pulls his parachute, but it's gone again just as quickly when the cords snap under their combined weight.

Hikaru was just starting to get this body the way he liked it, too.

He can feel Pavel's panic so intensely that he isn't really sure where it ends and his own panic begins. And then it all disappears in a moment of paralysing clarity as Pavel realises he knows how to beam them up.

It seems to take an eternity for anything to actually happen, though, and just when Hikaru expects to hit rock, he and Kirk hit the transporter pad. Pavel curses gleefully from behind the controls, grinning widely. Hikaru exhales in disbelief and says, "Thanks."

"No problem," Kirk says.

They have to crawl out of Commander Spock's way as he beams down to the planet's surface, and then they watch in horror as Pavel loses Spock's mother's signal. Of all the things Hikaru's witnessed in his life, the look on Pavel's face when he realises what's just happened is one of the worst.

He goes over to the console and touches Pavel's shoulder. It's the first time he's ever touched him, and it sends a jolt through his system. He thinks Pavel might have felt it as well, the way he turns to face Hikaru. "You saved _me_ ," he says, because no human's ever done that before. Not him, not any other angel. Maybe that's what Pavel was supposed to do all along.

A nurse takes Hikaru's arm and leads him away to sickbay before Pavel has a chance to reply.

***

Pavel comes to find him one night during the long, slow limp back to Earth. "May I come in, Lieutenant?" he asks when Hikaru answers the door.

"Please, call me Hikaru," he says. He steps back to let Pavel in. "I was wondering when you'd come to see me."

"You said something strange in the transporter room. What is so special about you? Why do I feel like I know you, Lieu—Hikaru?"

"You're smart enough to be able to tell if I lie to you, aren't you?" Hikaru asks. Pavel nods, crossing his arms. "You can sit down, if you like. We have met, once. A very long time ago."

Pavel perches on the edge of Hikaru's bed, looking up at him. "At the academy?"

"Longer ago than that," he says, shaking his head. He sits down next to Pavel and takes a deep breath before he continues. "I was at your mother's funeral."

Confusion passes across Pavel's face, then recognition, then disbelief. "You—I thought I was seeing things. You were the man; you were there with my mother. But you haven't aged a day. What _are_ you?" he demands.

"I guess you'd call me a guardian angel," Hikaru says.

"I don't believe in god," Pavel says immediately.

"I'm not so convinced myself."

He buries his head in his hands. "I don't understand. You're an... an _angel_ , but you don't believe in god? And you've been following me since my mother died?"

"Since before that, actually. I was there when you were born. I've watched you grow up, Pavel, because you're supposed to do something no one's ever done before."

"What?"

"Uh, we don't exactly know. I think it might have been you saving me. No human's ever saved an angel before, so... seems like the obvious thing." Hikaru looks across at him. "I know this is a lot to take in."

"Is this why I feel a weird connection to you?" he asks quietly. "I thought it might just be a survivor's guilt thing."

"Maybe it's both," Hikaru says, and he reaches up to brush his fingertips over Pavel's cheek. They definitely both feel the jolt this time, like static electricity.

"Oh," they say at the same time. They laugh nervously, and then Pavel's in Hikaru's lap and he's kissing him. It's the strangest, best thing Hikaru's ever felt and he has no idea what to do.

"I've never done this before," he says. With some difficulty, because Pavel's tongue is trying to get into his mouth.

"Never?" Pavel asks. "Do you want me to stop?"

Hikaru doesn't want that and Pavel isn't stopping anyway. Kissing turns out to be easier to pick up than he'd expected, though part of him still finds it incredibly alien. He thinks he might be in love with the feeling of touching Pavel's bare skin and being touched in return, though.

"I've never done this before, either," Hikaru says against Pavel's lips as things progress. "I've never even _wanted_ —fuck. Everything's changed. I've never done this."

"I'll show you." And he does, guiding Hikaru through everything patiently. Then he pushes him down onto the bed and straddles him, before shifting his hips back slowly.

It's everything Hikaru ever expected from sex—clumsy, sticky, awkward, sweaty—and one thing he'd never really stopped to think about. It feels so good he thinks he might die, and judging from the noises and the expression on Pavel's face as he rides him, Pavel feels much the same way.

"Stroke me," he orders. Hikaru can't think of any reply so he does as he's told, trying to recall the way he did it to himself in the shower.

Pavel comes first, sighing. He holds onto Hikaru's shoulders and keeps moving until Hikaru gasps in a surprised sort of way and comes as well, his hips lifting to thrust inside Pavel of their own accord.

"Stay inside me," Pavel says breathlessly, slumping against Hikaru's chest. Hikaru doesn't think he can remember how to move his limbs anyway, so he's more than happy to oblige.

It takes a while, but he slowly starts to realise that something's changed. Something's missing. It feels like a raw wound in his chest where something's been torn free and stolen. "I can't feel you any more," Hikaru says softly. He curls his fingers around Pavel's wrist, trying to reassure himself with Pavel's solid presence.

Pavel exhales slowly, his breath tickling Hikaru's skin. "I'm here."

"No, I mean... there was this thing, this emotional bond. I knew what you were feeling and even what you were thinking, to an extent, but now it's gone." Hikaru inhales shakily. "I can't remember not feeling what you were feeling."

"I'll tell you how I'm feeling and what I'm thinking." Pavel noses against the side of his neck, then sucks Hikaru's earlobe into his mouth, tonguing it gently. Hikaru feels the thrill of arousal running through him again, and his cock twitches with interest inside Pavel's body. "Oh, see, you're thinking the same as me already," he murmurs.

"I'm also thinking I know what's happened," Hikaru says. "It's the original sin. You're the forbidden fruit. And the only beings that have original sin are—"

"Humans," he finishes. "You're human now?"

"I think I must be."

"That's okay," Pavel says, and he smiles.


End file.
